1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to solving a data skew issue of an electronic device having a plurality of lanes, and more particularly, to a method and an apparatus for performing de-skew control.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Data skew is one of the problems possibly encountered when a traditional electronic device is performing data transmission. For example, the traditional electronic device may have a peripheral component interconnect (PCI) express port arranged to communicate with external device(s). For another example, the traditional electronic device may have a PCI express bus for allowing a plurality of internal modules in the traditional electronic device to communicate with each other. In related arts, the traditional electronic device usually needs various extra control mechanisms, to solve the data skew problem. However, new problems such as some side effects are thereby introduced. For example, a conventional method employs different clock phases to sample data to obtain a plurality sampling results corresponding to the different clock phases, respectively, and then attempts to find a correct sampling result among the plurality of sampling results. This makes the entire hardware structure (more particularly, the sizes of buffers and sizes of clock sources) too large, and also raises related production cost. Another conventional method employs different clock domains in the physical layer of the traditional electronic device to perform write operations, and employs the same clock domain to perform read operations. This makes the entire hardware structure too complicated. More particularly, a lot of extra control signals are required for controlling the data flow. Yet another conventional method attempts to directly move a certain predetermined symbol to the first bit, which makes the traditional electronic device incompatible with new structures and have a quite long latency. Hence, there is a need for a novel method to improve the data transmission performance.